Out and About! & My Query Letter!

Hello my lovelies!! Sorry I haven't blogged lately, I've been busy moving and setting up a new group blog for 2012 YA Sci-Fi Debuts called BRAVE NEW WORDS! Check out the link for giveaways of two recent dystopian debuts that I absolutely loved: WITHER by Lauren DeStefano and POSSESSION by Elana Johnson. Also, in the most recent post I posted my query letter that snagged me my agent! Click on the link below!

BRAVE NEW WORDS

Path to Publication

Just read Jessica Shea Spotswood's blog about her path to publication, and I agree! I love hearing people's stories about getting published too! So I thought I'd share mine--important dates in bold if you're in a skimming mood ;)

• Spring Semester 2010: amorphous period where I start planning out Glitch. My last novel has just been rejected by enough agents, even ones who'd read the manuscript, that I figure it is time to move on with a new project. I'd always wanted to write a dystopia since I read and LOVED 1984 in high school, so I sit down and write out my favorite elements of dystopias and think about what my ultimate imaginary dystopic future might look like.
• Chatting with computer science-y husband, and he brings up this article he'd just read in Popular Science. Ideas about implanted computer bits in humans start germinating.
• Came up with the love interest hook and start falling in love with my characters and story For Serious.
• June 2010: exhaustion from previous semester and some life things prevent actual starting of book. Instead, complete scenes play out over and over in my head, mostly at night when I am trying to fall asleep!
• July 2010: FINALLY! Time and energy to write! I take after it like gang-busters and have a first draft by August 1st.
• First week of August: edit non-stop for a very intense week, and start querying, probably before I should have, but oh well, I have the patience of a gnat!
• August: get lots of requests from agents to read the manuscript! yay! and then:
• Sept. 15 2010: Charlie Olsen of Inkwell Management emails saying he'd read the first third of my book and was loving it and would like to set up a phone call with me!! An actual phone call! with an agent! just like I heard about with others authors but had never happened with the two other books I'd queried. I still remember the coffeeshop chair I was sitting in when I got that email. After trying for YEARS to be a writer, I had my first indication that the impossible dream might be actually possible!
• The next Monday: we talk on the phone, and I am a lot less nervous than I thought I'd be, even though Charlie is less excited about the second half of the book, parts where it dragged. We talk potential edits, he mentions what he'd like to see, maybe some scenes to add, and I am super stoked, because not only was I talking to an ACTUAL AGENT, but he really GETS the feel of the book, and all of his ideas are totally in sync with what I want the book to be.
• Rest of September: Heather goes into Crazy Edit & Rewrite Mode.
• Mid-October: I send in the edited manuscript, and Charlie asks for Outlines of Book II and III in the intended trilogy. I say 'sure!' then sit down and try to figure out how the hell to write an outline ;)
• October 27th: Another phone call! Offer of representation! Giddy jumping up and down! I have an agent!!!
• November: More edits. We decide to wait to submit to editors till after the holidays.
• January 15, 2011: Book goes on submission!!!!
• January 15th-26th: Absolute worst ten days of my life. A few editors pass. I am sure I am DOOMED TO ABYSMAL FAILURE, HOW COULD I HAVE DELUDED MYSELF INTO BELIEVING I COULD BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR? OH GOD, WHAT DO I WRITE NEXT? I THOUGHT MY BOOK WAS GOOD BUT NOW I'M SURE IT'S A STEAMING PILE OF SH---- then I get a call from my agent. We have an offer!
• January 26th: Omg, an offer! From a super awesome publishing house, a 3-book deal! And not just any house, but St. Martin's Press! A publishing house that I have not only heard of, but one that publishes some books I've loved, that are sitting on my shelves RIGHT NOW! Squeeeee!
• Feb 1st: Deal is official. Holy shit, I'm going to be a published author, slated for Sp/Su 2012. I walk around in a daze smiling so much my mouth hurts by the end of the day.
• 2nd week of February: Magical foreign rights agent at Inkwell, Lyndsey Blessing, solidifies deals for Glitch trilogy in Germany and France!! OMG!
• Feb. 10th: first call with my editor from St. Martin's, Terra Layton. She is AWESOME and so excited about my book! We talk for an hour about the edits and the process and I feel so lucky to have gotten such a rocking editor!

Overflow of Happy

Agent Dude has referred to the process of all the people working to make a book happen--writer, agent, editor, other readers, foreign rights agents, and more--as making great music. I like this metaphor a lot because it implies a group of individuals all working together to create, not a product, but a moment, a shared experience--something alive that is then given to the world, something that will hopefully carry meaning and emotion beyond ourselves to others.

I just had a very difficult last week followed by a very wonderful few days, culminating in today, which has been a combustion of happy and love and giving to others. And all of the wonder-ment has been because of relationships in my life. I feel this overflow of happy in my chest, fullness, that old biblical image of 'my cup runneth over'. The question of how do you contain happiness over the long-haul? Answer: you don't contain it, you give it away, and paradoxically, I think that's how it stays with you.

Journey to a Book Deal

So it's been about a week since I found out about my book deal... and yeah, those three words together--'my book deal'--still sound a little bananas. I've spent the week walking around in daze, giddily connecting with other writer's whose books debut in 2012 too (also known as The Apocalypsies), completely blowing off reading for my grad school classes, and using far too many exclamation points in every email/post/tweet. I've been thinking about how I got here, and wanted to put it on paper (like the way moms always want to tell thier gory birth stories after they pop out a kid):

I got my agent the old fashioned way: hard work, querying, rejection, more hard work, more querying, more rejection, you get the picture :) Glitch is the third book I’ve written all the way through and queried, and each manuscript along the way was a necessary (if grueling) step on the path to becoming a better writer. The first one was bad, but it taught me plotting. The second one was a little less bad and I’d gotten better at dialogue and keeping tension up during scenes, but agents rejecting it said it didn’t have a strong enough or unique voice. And the third one, I finally figured out what the hell they meant by voice. Which is actually one of the most important things to figure out (though some people, and yes I am insanely jealous of them, come by it naturally). Best definition I’ve found for what ‘voice’ is: Steven Malk’s Interview on Literary Rambles. To sum up: figure out who’s telling your story and make their personality come through in the way you tell it.

I’d been thinking through Glitch all of the Spring semester (I can’t seem to use academic brain and creative writing brain at the same time!), but wrote it mainly in July 2010. I started querying agents in August, got more requests for manuscripts than ever before, and in September, Charlie Olsen emailed saying he wanted to set up a call with me. He said he liked it, but wanted me to do some edits before he’d take me on as a client. I dug in, and in October, he offered representation! Then we did more edits, and decided to wait for the new year before submitting. And voila, started submitting in January and last week got the offer from St. Martin’s Press. I don’t know if that’s whirlwind or if it just feels like it to me, like it’s too ridiculously wonderful a dream to be true, but here we are. I’m sure more deep edits are headed my way, but I love getting to dig into the story again like wet clay. Or maybe kneading bread is a better analogy. That’s the picture in my head when it comes to edits: knuckles in, muscles working, to shape a dull lump into something glossy and magical shining.

And Out It Goes!

So, my novel GLITCH is officially out on submission to editors! Agent Dude has gotten some bites on it, and now it's just wait time (in my head I'm assigning a month or two wait time so I don't go bananas in the meanwhile). I'm wiggin' out a little bit, but mostly am keeping my brain busy with other things like finishing my thesis proposal and getting the house ready to sell. And devouring newly obtained YA lit:

Unearthly by Cynthia Hand: This is one of the MOST GORGEOUS COVERS ever. Seriously, maybe you have to see it in person for the full effect, but the matte purple backround, raised image of the chick in the foreground and silver script--so gorgeous. And the book inside sounds pretty exciting and I've heard good reviews too. I've been excited about this one for awhile and bought it yesterday. I'm diving into it tonight!

Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl: I know this was released a few months ago, but I just finally got my hands on a copy from the library. I liked the first one, we'll see how the author's keep up the tension and story in book II.

And last, thoughts from the always-inspiring-and-sanity-reminding Natalie Goldberg:

The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world, and why not finally carry that secret out with our bodies into the living rooms and porches, backyards and grocery stores? Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world. -Writing Down the Bones (120).

The Writing Life

The semester has finally ended and I find myself with a bit of that precious commodity: time. Of course, the accompanying necessary ingredient: motivation--now that one's still missing a bit. I know logically that after the stress of the semester that I'd have to just be prone for a week, but there's a buzzing under my skin to get started on all the projects I couldn't during school. Like writing!!

I'm doing last edits on Glitch before Agent Dude sends the manuscript out on submission in Jan. He's mentioned some impressive publishing houses, now we'll just see if they want me. Do you remember the refrain of that 90's song by the Cardigans:

Love me, love me, say that you love me

Yeah, the entire querying, trying to get an agent, and now sending it on submission to editors makes that song refrain sound over and over in my head. Love me! Love me! Say that you love me! And my book!

But then, because I'm me, this leads to larger existential questions - isn't that the refrain to most our lives - would someone or multiple someones just love us and want us around? Sometimes I've thought the epigraph of my life would be: she wanted to be wanted. Which um, yeah, sounds a little emo and pathetic, but really, I think it's what most of us just want. It's what I wanted when I was a dorky 7th grader hoping for a seat at the lunch table with the cool kids, it's what I wanted when I went off to college and started dating, it's what we want when we are interviewing for jobs, when looking for agents, and now publishers. Like me, like me! I swear I'm cool enough to belong here! I'm unique and special, like the snowflakes!! Like the snowflakes, dammit!

I Am An Agented Author!!!

That’s right folks. The illusive dream has been made real, and I have my name signed on the contract to prove it. With Charlie Olsen of Inkwell Management!! And really, while this feels like the end of one journey, I know it’s really the beginning of another—the real stuff of being an author.

So allow me a bit of memory lane--I started writing prolifically in 2006, the first time I’d ever done so in my life.I hadn’t written so much as a short story since I was in high school, so needless to say, the learning curve was high. And slow. Much slower than I’d anticipated, and if I’d have known then that it would take me four novels to work out all my crappy first attempts and that I wouldn’t really get anywhere until the fifth, I don’t know if I would have had the mojo to keep going. But alas, as ignorance is bliss—I thought that first novel was going to be amazing, that I was already fabulous, that I’d be one of those amazing people who writes a kick-ass novel their first try. Yeah. Or not. J

But perseverance, willingness to take critiques to heart, continuing on try after try after try, through hundreds and hundreds of wasted pages, querying two failed novels, and figuring out what the hell they mean by voice, I’ve just signed with an agent for my novel GLITCH. Which is where we get to the part about this being a beginning.

This does not feel real yet, and maybe that’s just because I was really confident in this book, and I’d had so much interest from agents—so I can’t tell if it’s just because underneath I was confident it might happen this time, or if good things just take a really long time to click with me as real (I felt the same way about being a mom, to be honest—they handed me this squirming squishy mass with big eyes and tiny fists and I was like, oh, wow, well, this is, you know, cool, I guess). Talking with my rockin’ agent doesn’t make me feel very nervous either, it just seems all like—yeah, I was ready for this, I put in the work and it was time.

And digging into the new edits feels like a delightful vacation from the detestable grad school papers I’ve been trying to force myself to write—because this is where I want to spend my energy and brain power and creativity. I’ve been itching to get back to storytelling, and now I get to.

The Utopia That Was Not

So. Grad School. Let's just say that it's not what I thought it would be. Because the discussions that are had are not any more intelligent than undergrad... and, how do I put this delicately? the standard for academic excellence isn't set very high. Why, in grad school, am I still only required to write five-seven page papers? In both my classes. Aren't much longer papers supposed to be the standard - like 10-20 pages? Which would be hard, but that's the point - it's supposed to be a lot harder therefore making you push yourself to new levels. Because, you know, we should have a lot more to say about topics, more research, more analysis, I mean, freakin' A! I guess I just imagined grad school like this academic utopia where every one is really smart and dedicated, and not only DOES the reading, but tries to UNDERSTAND and analyze the reading in a meaningful way that promotes intelligent discussion. Isn't that the point? Where we are learning how to participate in the larger academic community of quality scholarship??? The answer is, maybe not at Texas State University. Time will tell.

In other news, I'm re-writing the novel I had been querying agents for. Really learning the ins and outs of how the market works, especially as regards to children's publishing, has been invaluable, and something i think only could have been done the hard way - i.e. writing a book, trying to sell it, understanding why its not selling, and not just being like - fucking publishers! don't realize GENIUS when they come across it! So. There are some problems with the book. The main one of which is "voice". I kept seeing this all over agent requirements - they don't care what the material is but only if it has strong voice. One agent put it simply, "Voice, voice, voice!" And me sitting there constantly seeing the phrase and idea pop up, was like, what the fuck is voice????? That was always one of those words I'd heard bandied around, and vaguely had an idea of meaning, but not specifically, and not enough to put my novel and my writing under the litmus test to discover if it had this elusive entity of "voice".

I'm finally kind of getting it. It's like tone, which is also hard for me to define, other than just saying - you know, how it feels, the vibe you get from reading it. But where the rubber meets the road - how the hell do you CREATE that feeling or tone? I've been writing seriously for four years now, written two and a half novels (two of which were about Persephone, trying different angles, but all completely different...and all shitty) and I still don't know exactly how to manipulate language to create the tone I want - though I'm finally learning. I've written thirty pages on the new novel, writing it as Persephone in the 21st century as a teenager - and I'm writing first person, plopped directly in her head, so that what is on the page are her thoughts and personality. And I think it's getting a vibe.

Also, it should be a much better sell when I start querying for it because it actually FITS. Unlike straight high fantasy, which the one I've had is. Urban fantasy, or at least starting from a relatable protagonist who is just like us, and then taking her to crazy places, is not going out of style anytime soon. It's kind of timeless - that starting in our world and then bringing in fantasy or surreal elements. Just ask Alice. And I'm writing with attention to voice for the first time, which is this wild paradigm shift that I've really needed to move forward with my writing. I'll still be querying and honing the old version in case I do catch interest somewhere, but I have a feeling it'll be the new version that starts that chapter in my life.